Designing the next generation of activity tackers for performance sports: insights from elite tennis coaches

Abstract

Wearable sport technologies and activity trackers help sportspeople by providing physiological information on their performance. However, professional sportspeople find this information irrelevant due to their high-performance training. They want these devices to provide real-time assistive feedback on their performance, despite the formidable limitations suggested by previous research on giving such feedback. On the other hand, sport coaches already give performance feedback to their sportspeople during their performance.We speculated that some of their approaches might give clues for designing activity trackers with useful real-time performance feedback. Consequently, we interviewed six elite tennis coaches to explore their approaches of communicating performance information to their players, during tennis games. In this paper, we discussed the findings by comparing them with related work and formed two design insights for giving real-time performance feedback that might lead to novel approaches for activity trackers.